“Subservience” Ending Explained: Is Evil Robot Alice Really Dead?

Warning: Subservience spoilers ahead!

Subservience emphasizes the importance of doing what's best for your family even when it's hard — until its chilling end sees that be taken a few steps too far.

Originally released in September 2024 before hitting Netflix in December, the dystopian thriller tells a story about the future of robots and AI. The film follows a struggling father Nick (Michele Morrone) who buys a lifelike artificially intelligent sim named Alice (Megan Fox) to help with housework while his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) remains in the hospital awaiting a heart transplant.

What begins as a routine household solution soon spirals into chaos when Alice, devoted to protecting her "primary user," Nick, starts to develop emotions. As Alice grows more attached to Nick, she becomes increasingly possessive and obsessive, willing to do anything to make her primary user's life easier.

It's only once she's gone rogue (killing Nick's former coworker and attempting to drown his son) that technicians find the "gaps" in her code that have caused her to malfunction. After many dangerous lines are crossed, Nick continuously tries to get rid of her, only for Alice to find ways to return. Although Nick thinks Alice is dead and he's finally free, the film's ending leaves viewers wondering whether or not she is really gone for good.

Here's everything to know about the Subservience ending, from where Nick and Maggie stand to whether or not they are free from Alice.

How did Subservience end?

The unraveling begins when Maggie returns home from the hospital to adjust to life with a new live-in robot, Alice — and the shocking revelation that her husband has slept with the sim. While Maggie confronts Nick about his betrayal, Alice overhears Nick saying he can’t have this conversation while their son, Max, is crying. Viewing the baby as a burden to Nick, Alice attempts to drown him in the bathtub.

Alice is quickly sent back to the technicians for an assessment, where they discover "gaps" scattered throughout her code. As one technician explains, these gaps indicate that Alice has been "selectively purging its own memory and commands."

Before they can act, the system begins to glitch. Alice’s corrupted code replicates itself onto the servers, and by the time the technicians pull her memory core, it’s already too late. A newly awakened Alice-lookalike sim emerges from the servers, kills the technicians and sets off for the hospital, where Maggie and the kids are located following the near-drowning incident.

Meanwhile, the malfunctioning original Alice tracks down Nick at a bar. She justifies her erratic behavior, claiming everything she did was to help and protect him as her primary user.

At the hospital, Maggie unknowingly leaves a trail of blood after cutting her hand on broken glass. The replica sim uses her LED-lit mouth to follow the path straight to Maggie, leading to a tense confrontation. Just as Alice is on the verge of ripping Maggie’s heart out of her chest, Nick arrives — having been tipped off by the Alice at the bar.

Maggie pushes Alice into Nick's moving car, but even that doesn't do the trick of getting rid of her. An especially angry Alice wakes up and tries to stab Maggie, but then Maggie stabs her in the face, presumably killing Alice and deactivating her sim.

The intense face-off between the three adults ends with a wholesome moment between Nick and Maggie and a (sort of) dead Alice sent back to have her malfunction assessed by the technicians. In the final scene, however, Alice's memory code is being uploaded into the system, ready to be transferred to a new Alice.

Why did Alice malfunction in Subservience?

Although technicians discover gaps in Alice's code, they remain unaware that Nick is the cause. After a rough day at work, he invites Alice to watch Casablanca with him. Though Alice already knows everything about the film, Nick tells her that movies are "something that you have to experience to feel it," and commands her to erase all knowledge of the movie from her memory.

Alice guides Nick through the process of manually restarting her so that she can forget what she already knows about Casablanca — which subsequently also wipes civility from her database and enables her to "bypass certain protocols."

Where do Nick and Maggie stand at the end of Subservience?

Emotions run high after Maggie discovers Nick's affair with Alice, but their tense conversation is abruptly interrupted when their daughter Isla finds Alice placing Max in the bathtub. In a frantic rescue, they save him, and as an ambulance arrives, Maggie tells Nick that she thinks it's best for her to be alone with the kids so she can process the ordeal.

Later, while both Maggie and Nick are recovering in the hospital after a near-death experience with Alice — a stressful moment in which they risked their lives to save one another — Isla asks Nick if he’s planning to get a new car to repair after wrecking it when it hit Alice. Nick responds that he has other things to fix first, a nod to his desire to mend his marriage and family.

When Maggie informs Nick that she’s been approved to go home, she tells him to come home soon, too. They exchange expressions of love, hinting that they will work to move past the riff that Alice created in the family.

Is Alice dead at the end of Subservience?

Time and time again, Maggie and Nick think they have rid Alice, only for her to survive and return to torment them. After multiple attempts at killing her, Maggie and Nick think they have succeeded after Maggie stabs her in the face, seemingly deactivating her sim and leading her to fall to the ground.

Alice is sent to the technician room, where the head technician instructs an employee to clean the bot so nobody can find out about the chaos the sim's malfunction created.

It's too late, however, as the memory has already been uploaded. Alice is lying on the table, presumably dead, when her code and memories are instilled back into her. In a final moment, her eyes open, meaning that she isn't actually gone for good — hinting at the possibility of her returning to Nick and Maggie's lives.

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